How to Break a Bad Habit
Breaking bad.
When it comes to habit change, the worst ones are the hardest to break. Why? Our brains are literally at war with themselves in modern life: wired for short-term reward in a modern world perfectly aligned to feed unhealthy addictions. Add in the uncertainty of a global pandemic and you’ve got an ideal breeding ground for unhinged anxiety. “Our survival brain says, ‘Uncertainty is bad; let’s make it go away.’ Brief distractions help: alcohol, stress eating, social media—even the habit of worrying gets stronger, because if the brain can’t have certainty, at least it can worry instead,” says Dr. Jud Brewer, who literally wrote the book on hacking the brain’s reward system to change habits. We asked him for the Cliffs Notes to help us crack the code.
Working from home means more temptation to, say, watch cute puppy videos on social media. But according to Dr. Jud, when you understand the brain’s wiring, it’s easy to see how this can spiral out of control. The neocortex, the “new brain,” is set up to help us survive modern life by simulating—and making decisions around—the future. If we take a business trip, for example, the brain will look to the past and say, here’s how it’s gone before with flights and hotels, so here’s what to expect. But without available information (say, when dealing with a novel virus), this brain function becomes maladaptive. The key to weathering this perfect storm of worry leading to the wrong kinds of rewards, he says, is to use this understanding to work with the brain, rather than against it, by leaning into uncertainty as a form of growth.
Here are his concrete strategies to break habits and better know your mind:
Map out your habit loop: behavior, trigger, result. You can download a habit mapper to help you see what is happening with your habit in order to work on it.
Once you see it, tap into your brain to see how it works. Behaviors are perpetuated based on how rewarding they are. So breaking bad habits is not about willpower (the “If only I could control myself” blame game)—that’s not how the brain works. Rather, pay attention to the results of behavior; if you can see the ways in which the behavior is not rewarding, you’ll become disenchanted and break the habit. Dr. Jud’s lab just completed a study using an app to increase mindfulness during overeating; they found that paying attention while overeating 10-15 times led to significant reductions in the habit. But any habit can be interrupted when the brain becomes disenchanted with its rewards (or lack thereof).
Find a healthy BBO. That’s bigger, better offer, the thing your brain will start looking for as you break your habit loop. The best BBO is one that doesn’t drive the same habit loops; substituting candy for smoking doesn’t actually work to curb the craving. The key is to find something intrinsically rewarding, and research has shown that both curiosity and kindness can do that. That’s because craving something like stress eating feels closed and contracted, like worrying. Curiosity feels open—and you can’t be closed and open at same time. They’re binary opposites. Curiosity feels different *and* better than worrying, so substituting it works to open up that contracted quality that comes with craving or worrying. Similarly, a habit like stress eating involves self-judgment, which is closed; substituting kindness over self-judging is open and feels better.
The more we try to avoid uncertainty, the harder it is to adapt our brains. Learning to lean into uncertainty and discomfort by recognizing how brain science leads to unproductive habits can help us change with our changing environment with a growth mindset.
